1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an image information communication apparatus and, more particularly, to an image information communication apparatus such as a facsimile apparatus which can send a notification to a remote facsimile apparatus during a communication protocol procedure.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a facsimile apparatus scans an original document by using a scanner to obtain image data (referred to as raster data), and the image data is encoded and compressed by a predetermined encoding system and is sent to a remote terminal. In the remote terminals, the received image data is decoded to the original image data. The decoded original data is supplied to a printer to output a hard copy of the received image data.
The scanner reading an original document uses a line image sensor as a reading head so as to read the original image line by line with a predetermined resolution (resolution in a secondary scanning direction). The line image sensor reads an image of a single line with a predetermined resolution which corresponds to the number of photoreceiving elements provided in the line image sensor along a primary scanning direction.
If the magnitude of the resolutions in the primary scanning direction and the secondary scanning direction are not sufficiently large, a pixel structure undesirably appears in a printed image. Especially, a zigzag pattern appears in a diagonal line to the primary or secondary scanning direction, resulting in poor image quality.
In order to eliminate such a problem, the resolutions in the primary and secondary scanning directions may be increased. However, such a method increases a manufacturing cost of the printer and the scanner.
On the other hand, an OCR facsimile apparatus having an optical character reading (OCR) function has been developed and is available on the market. The OCR facsimile apparatus applies the OCR process to received image data which was obtained from a character image so as to convert the image data into character code data. Since an output from a printer is based on character pattern data generated by a character image generating means such as a font memory, the above mentioned zigzag pattern does not exist in the characters printed by the printer. Thus, the character image can be output with high image quality.
However, the OCR facsimile apparatus has the following problem. That is, the image data received from a remote terminal may contain not only character image data but also pattern image data. If the OCR process is applied to the pattern image data which does not correspond to characters, the original pattern image cannot be restored. More specifically, if the original document contains characters according to a predetermined font and an image such as a handwritten illustration and the like and if the image data is applied with the OCR process, the characters can be printed out through the OCR process but the handwritten illustration cannot be printed out as it was in the original image.
Additionally, image data received from a remote terminal may be applied with a halftone process which may be applied to obtain better image quality for a photographic image and the like. If the character image is applied with the halftone process, the edge of characters may be faded. This may cause a problem in that an appropriate character pattern recognition cannot be performed in the OCR process.